Amorim fires parting shot at Man Utd legends who 'talk a lot' from a different era

Ruben Amorim has rounded on the former Manchester United players who publicly criticised him during his troubled tenure at Old Trafford, saying the club’s legends ‘talk a lot about things’ from a completely different era.

The Portuguese coach, sacked earlier this year after presiding over United’s worst-ever Premier League finish and winning just 24 of his 63 games in charge, has since taken the head coach role at AC Milan. Asked about the experience of managing a club whose former greats hold prominent media positions, Amorim was pointed in his response.

“I was in a club in the past with a lot of legends, and they have big opinions, and they talk a lot about things,” he said. “They lived in a time that was completely different.”

The comment is a clear reference to figures such as Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes, all of whom regularly offered critical assessments of Amorim’s struggling side. Scholes was among the most direct, claiming Amorim was not “the right man” and did not “get the club” before his eventual dismissal.

Amorim had addressed those criticisms while still in the job, arguing that the former players lacked the full picture. “Sometimes they don’t have all the information and they see Manchester United with the standards that they lived here, always winning,” he said at the time. “So it’s hard for them to see their club in this situation.”

The bulk of United’s pundit class built their reputations during the Sir Alex Ferguson era, when the club dominated the Premier League and were perennial Champions League contenders. United’s last league title came in 2013, and their presence at Europe’s top table has become increasingly sporadic since.

Amorim now faces a similar dynamic at Milan, a club with its own weight of history and its own generation of former greats with strong opinions on the current state of affairs. Whether he navigates that pressure more successfully at San Siro than he did in Manchester remains to be seen.